“If we are going to prepare for a manned mission to Mars in the future, we need to have as much knowledge as possible on the practicalities and limitations of working in spacesuits on planetary terrains. For World Space Walk 2013, we have the amazing opportunity to work with four different teams who are developing spacesuits and to collaborate on the same set of tasks. While with different spacesuits and testers, you can’t run an exact comparison. However, we can make a start on building up a body of knowledge about how spacesuits affects the ability of the wearers to perform a task. Today’s technical test is a simple, yet important, first milestone to compare different analog suit systems worldwide,” says Gernot Groemer, the President of the Austrian Space Forum.